The extant literatures in strategic human resources management (SHRM) and job design have remarkably little in common. The SHRM literature focuses on human resource (HR) management systems as sources of competitive advantage, and employees as strategic assets. HR management systems and employee talent are thought of as part of a strategic architecture that has a managerially significant influence on the firm's financial performance. The focus is macro and the intellectual motivations blend HR with strategy, economics, and finance (Becker & Huselid, 2006). By contrast, the job design literature is largely micro and focuses on the nature and structure of work itself. The very centrality of work in the life of most people means that job or work design, and the impact of those design elements on job incumbents, is a compelling research focus. The SHRM framework clearly locates the job as a means to an end, achieving the organization's strategic goals. Given the central role work plays in our lives, the job design literature tends to focus more on the social and psychological influences on individuals in those jobs. While the potential contribution of the job to organizational performance is not entirely ignored in the job design literature, the focus is at the level of individual performance much like the traditional HR literature.
Recent work in both areas, however, suggests several opportunities to narrow the divide. Reviews of the job design literature highlight the importance of changes in the economic environment, and the resulting changes in the nature of work from manufacturing to service and ''knowledge work''. While acknowledging the remarkable contributions of the field, there are increasing calls to broaden its focus in response to this changing environment. Grant and Parker (in press) describe this extension as a relational perspective emphasizing the ''social systems of work''. Kilduff and Brass (2010) and Morgeson and Humphrey (2008) have a similar theme emphasizing integration with the network and team literatures, respectively. As the job design literature broadens its reach, recent work in SHRM has highlighted the job as a core unit of analysis. Since its inception, the SHRM literature has focused on the problem of the ''black box,'' or elucidating the causal processes through which investments in HR management systems affect firm performance (Becker & Gerhart, 1996). As the empirical relationship between systems of HR practices and firm performance was replicated in multiple samples, industries and countries (Combs, Ketchen, Hall, & Liu, 2006), there has been an increasing interest in an elaboration of the processes and variables that mediate that relationship. Particular attention has